Soviet Fates and Lost Alternatives: From Stalinism
to the New Cold WarStephen F. Cohen

Chapter 6: Gorbachev's Lost
Legacies

"Do I think I realized my goals,
and in this respect am I happy? There’s no simple answer to this question. .
. . In general, I do not know of any happy reformers. History will show who
was right and who was wrong."—Mikhail Gorbachev, 1993/2000

In conventional political terms, Gorbachev failed, and did so
catastrophically: the “democratic reformation” he tried to enact in the
Soviet Union ended in the breakup of his state and country. But that is not
the full story of his six and a half years as leader, during which Gorbachev
had two unprecedented achievements. He led Russia (then Soviet Russia) closer
to real democracy than it had ever been in its centuries-long history. And,
with the partners he found in American presidents Ronald Reagan and the first
George Bush, he came closer to ending the decades-long Cold War than had
anyone before him.

Nor is it reasonable to think that Gorbachev should have completed those
undertakings. Few transformational leaders, even “event-making” and
“historically fateful” ones, are able to see their missions to completion.
This is especially true of leaders of great reformations, whose nature and
duration generate more opposition and problems than their initiators (unless
they are a Stalin) have power or time to overcome. Franklin Roosevelt’s New
Deal, to take a familiar example, a perestroika
of American capitalism, continued to unfold and undergo setbacks long after
his death. Most such leaders can only open political doors,
leave behind alternative paths that did not exist before, and hope, as
Gorbachev often did publicly, that what they began would be “irreversible.”Historic opportunities to modernize Russia gradually and
consensually and to end the Cold War were Gorbachev’s legacies. That they
were missed, or squandered, was the fault of elites and leaders who followed
him, both in Moscow and Washington.Indeed, those possibilities were soon
misrepresented and then half-forgotten. Despite the democratic breakthroughs
under Gorbachev examined earlier, the role of “father of Russian democracy”
was soon reassigned to his successor, Boris Yeltsin. Along with the
Washington political establishment, leading American journalists now informed
readers that it was Yeltsin who began “Russia’s transition from
totalitarianism,” who “set Russia on a course toward democracy,” and under
whom its “first flickerings of democratic
nationhood” occurred.Remarkably, many
academic specialists concurred: “Democracy emerged in Russia after the
collapse of Soviet Communism in 1991.” In effect, Gorbachev’s model of
evolutionary democratization was deleted from history and thus from politics.

How is this historical amnesia to be explained? In
post-Soviet Russia, the primary cause was political expediency. Fearing a
backlash at home against their role in the Soviet breakup and worried about
Gorbachev’s continuing popularity abroad, Yeltsin and his inner circle
insisted that the new Russian president was the “undoubted father of Russian
democracy” and Gorbachev merely a half-hearted reformer who tried to “save
Communism.” Early on, even a few Russian supporters of Yeltsin understood
that this was both untrue and dangerous for the country’s future. Recalling
Gorbachev’s role as “liberator,” one wrote: “Miracles do not happen. People
who are not capable of appreciating a great man cannot successfully lead a
state."

In the West, and particularly in the United States, a more ideological
politics inspired the revised history. Gorbachev’s historic reforms, along
with Washington’s previous hope that they would succeed, were quickly
obscured as the Soviet breakup and purported U.S. victory in the Cold War
became defining moments in a new American triumphalist narrative. The entire
history of the “defeated” Soviet enemy was now presented in the press as
“Russia’s seven decades as a rigid and ruthless police state,” a “wound
inflicted on a nation . . . over most of a century,” an experience “every bit
as evil as we had thought—indeed more so.” Reagan’s condemnation of the
Soviet Union as an “evil empire,” which he had happily rejected because of
Gorbachev’s reforms only three years before, was reinstated. An influential
columnist even declared that a “fascist Russia” would have been a “much
better thing.”

American scholars, some of them also inspired by “triumphalist belief,”
reacted similarly. With few exceptions, they reverted to old Sovietological axioms that the system had always been unreformable and its fate predetermined. The view that
there had been promising “roads not taken” in its history was again dismissed
as an “improbable idea” based on “dubious assumptions.” Gorbachev’s
“evolutionary middle path . . . was a chimera,” just as NEP had been, an
attempt “to reform the unreformable,” and the
Soviet Union therefore died from a “lack of alternatives.” Accordingly, most
scholars no longer asked, even in light of the calamities that followed, if a
reforming Soviet Union might have been the best hope for the post-Communist
future of Russia or any of the other former republics. On the contrary, they
insisted that everything Soviet “must be discarded” by “razing the entire
edifice of political and economic relations,” an exhortation that translated
into American cheerleading for Yeltsin’s extremist measures after 1991.

The revised history of the Soviet Union also required a revised memory of its
last leader. Once seen as the Soviet Union’s “No. 1 radical” and acclaimed
for his “boldness,” Gorbachev was now dismissed as having been “irresolute
and unproductive,” as well as insufficiently “radical.” The leader who said
of himself while in power, “everything new in philosophy begins as heresy and
in politics as the opinion of a minority,” and whose own Communist
fundamentalists were “against me, hate me” because his policies were
“heresy,” was recast as a man with “no deep convictions,” even as an
“orthodox Communist.” That persistent ideological response to Gorbachev’s
belief in a “socialism with a human face” also
promoted the assertion that Yeltsin had “introduced markets and democracy to
Russia.”

The notion that Gorbachev’s pro-democracy measures
and other reforms had been insufficiently radical misunderstands a fateful
difference between his approach and Yeltsin’s. From Peter the Great to
Stalin, the dominant leadership method of transforming Russia had been a
“revolution from above” that imposed wrenching changes on society through
state coercion. Looking back, many reform-minded Russians rejected those
methods as “modernization through catastrophe” because of their extraordinary
human and material costs and because they kept the Russian people as subjects
of the state rather than freeing them to become democratic citizens. Yeltsin’s
“shock-therapy” measures of the early 1990s, though his purpose was
different, continued that baneful tradition.

Gorbachev emphatically rejected the tradition. From the beginning, he was
determined to “ensure that for the first time in its centuries-long history
our country would go through a turning point without bloodshed.” Perestroika,
he vowed, was a “historic chance to modernize the country through reforms,
that is by peaceful means”—a process “revo­lutionary in content but
evolutionary in methods and form.” Once initiated from above, it meant
putting the “cause of perestroika in the hands of the people,” not the state,
through “democratization of all spheres of Soviet life.” Readers already know
the price Gorbachev paid for choosing a “democratic reformation”—itself a
kind of leadership heresy—as an alternative to Russia’s history of imposed
transformations.

As political and social calamities unfolded under Yeltsin in the post-Soviet
1990s, Russian scholars and other intellectuals, unlike their American
counterparts, began to rethink the consequences of the Soviet breakup. A
growing number concluded that some form of Gorbachev’s perestroika, or
“non-catastrophic evolution,” even without him, had been a chance to
democratize and marketize Russia in ways less
traumatic and costly, and thus more fruitful, than those adopted by Yeltsin.
Russia’s historians (and politicians) will debate the issue for many years to
come, but the fate of the country’s democratization suggests why some of them
already believe that Gorbachev’s approach was a “lost alternative.”

Consider briefly the “trajectory,” as specialists say, of
four essential components of any democracy as they developed in Russia before
and after the end of the Soviet Union in December 1991:

Without a significant number of independent media,
other elements of democracy, from fair elections and constraints on power to
the administration of justice, cannot exist. In 1985 and 1986, Gorbachev
introduced “glasnost,” his necessary initial reform, which meant a gradual
diminishing of official censorship. By 1990 and 1991, the process had given
rise to a plethora of independent publications and, more importantly at the
time, to substantially uncensored state-owned national television, radio, and
newspapers. The latter development was attributable to Gorbachev’s committed
leadership, continued government funding of national media, and the absence
of other forces that might seize those opinion-shaping instruments for their
own purposes.

A reverse process began after Yeltsin’s victory in the failed August 1991
coup and his abolition of the Soviet Union in December. In both instances, he
closed several opposition newspapers while reasserting Kremlin censorship
over television. These were temporary measures, but more lasting control of
the post-Soviet national media followed Yeltsin’s armed destruction of the
Russian parliament in 1993 and his “privatization” decrees, which made a
small group of men, known as “oligarchs,” owners of the nation’s most valuable
assets, including the media.

The 1996 presidential election, which Yeltsin was at risk of losing to the
Communist Party candidate, marked the end of truly free and independent
nationwide media in post-Soviet Russia. Though some pluralism and independent
journalism remained, mainly because of internecine warfare among the media’s
oligarchic owners and a residual effect of Gorbachev’s glasnost, they
steadily declined. As a leading inde­pendent editor during both the Gorbachev
and post-Soviet years later emphasized: “In 1996, the Russian authorities . .
. and the largest business groups . . . jointly used the mass media, above
all television, for the purpose of manipulating voter behavior, and with real
success. Since that time, neither the authorities nor the oligarchs have let
this weapon out of their hands."

Other Russian journalists later compared their experiences during the
Gorbachev years favorably to what followed under Yeltsin and Putin, but here
is the judgment of a knowledgeable American head of an international
monitoring organization, written in 2005: “During glasnost, courageous
journalism pried open closed doors to history, sparked vig­orous debates on
multiparty democracy, and encouraged Soviet citizens to speak freely. . . .
But in today’s Russia, courageous journalists are endangered. . . . Reporting
on basic public issues is increasingly restricted, and the public is kept in
the dark about corruption, crime, and human rights abuses.”

Russian elections naturally took the same
“trajectory.” The first ever national multicandidate balloting in Soviet
history, for a Congress of People’s Deputies, took place in March 1989.
Though half of the deputies were chosen by institutions rather than popular
vote, it was a historic breakthrough in Gorbachev’s democratization campaign
and was soon followed by more important ones. Voting for a counterpart
legislature of the Soviet Russian Republic in early 1990 remains the freest
and fairest parliamentary election ever held in Russia. The same is true of
the 1991 electoral campaign for the new presidency of that Soviet republic,
in which a defiant Yeltsin defeated the Kremlin’s candidate by a wide margin.

No further Russian parliamentary or presidential elections occurred until
after the end of the Soviet Union, and when they did, each, while maintaining
an innocuous degree of competition, was less free and fair than its
predecessors. By 1996, Yeltsin’s backers had developed enough “political
technologies” for the “managed democracy” later associated with Vladimir
Putin—overwhelming use of funds, control of the mass media, restrictions on
independent candidates and parties, and falsified returns—to assure that
effective power remained with whoever already ruled Russia. Even the
referendum results said to have ratified Yeltsin’s new constitution in 1993,
unlike Gorbachev’s 1991 referendum on the Union, were
almost certainly falsified.

Most telling, Yeltsin’s election as Soviet Russian president in 1991 was the
first and the last time executive power was allowed to pass from the Kremlin
to an opposition candidate. In 2000, Yeltsin transferred power to Putin by
means of a “managed” election, and Putin made Dmitri Medvedev his successor
as president in a similar way in 2008. Even an American specialist
unsympathetic to Gorbachev’s reforms concluded that “Gorbachev-era elections
were less fixed and fraudulent than most post-Soviet parliamentary and
presidential elections in Russia have been.” A Russian commentator was more
succinct: “The peak of electoral democracy in our country came toward the end
of perestroika.”

But no Gorbachev-era democratic achievement was more
important, or decline more fateful, than the popularly elected Soviet
legislatures he promoted in 1989 and 1990. Democracy is possible without an
independent executive branch but not without a sovereign parliament or its
equivalent, the one truly indispensable institution of representative
government. From tsars to heads of the Soviet Communist Party, Russian
authoritarianism had featured overwhelming executive power and nonexistent or
doomed representative assemblies, from the Dumas of the late tsarist period
to the popularity elected soviets and Constitu­ent Assembly of 1917 and 1918.

In that context, the Soviet Congress elected in 1989 and its Russian Republic
counterpart in 1990—each chose a smaller Supreme Soviet to continue as a
sitting parliament—were the most historic result of
Gorbachev’s prodemocracy policies. The first functioned as an increasingly
independent constitutional convention, enacting legislation for the further
democratization of the Soviet Union by separating the powers previously
monopolized by tsars and commissars alike, while also empowering
investigative commissions and emerging as a source of opposition to
Gorbachev. The second did the same in the Russian Republic, most importantly
by amending its constitution to institute an elected presidency for Yeltsin.
Nonetheless, Gorbachev was so committed to real legislatures as an essential
component of democratization that he agreed only reluctantly to his own
executive presidency in 1990, worrying it might diminish their independence,
and he then endured, however un­happily, their mounting criticism of his
leadership.

Twenty years later, Russia’s post-Soviet Parliament, renamed the Duma, had
become a near replica of its weak and compliant tsarist-era predecessors, and
the presidency a nearly all-powerful institution. Two turning points marked
this fateful development. The first was in late 1991, when the Soviet
Congress was permitted to play almost no role during the last months of the
Soviet Union and then none at all in its dissolution. The second came in late
1993, when Yeltsin forcibly abolished the 1990 Russian Parliament and enacted
a super-presidential constitution. Thereafter, each successive parliament,
like each election, was less independent and influential, eventually
becoming, in the eyes of its critics, a “decorative” or “imitation”
legislature, like post-Soviet democracy itself.

Finally, viable democracies require governing elites
whose ranks are open, at least periodically, to representatives of other
parties, nonofficial institutions, and civil society. Until the onset of
perestroika, the self-appointed Soviet nomenklatura
monopolized political power and even participation in politics. Breaking that
monopoly by allowing the rise of new political actors from different
backgrounds and professions—an academic economist and a law professor were
elected the mayors of Moscow and Leningrad/St. Petersburg—was another
democratic breakthrough of the Gorbachev years. By 1990, such people made up
a significant minority in the Soviet Congress and a majority in the Soviet
Russian Parliament.

After 1991, that development was also reversed. The post-Soviet ruling elite
soon grew into a narrow group largely composed of the leader’s personal
entourage, financial oligarchs and their representatives, state bureaucrats,
and people from military and security institutions. The growing number of
military and security officers at the highest levels of government, for
example, is usually attributed to Putin, a former KGB colonel, but it began
soon after the Soviet breakup. Before 1992, under Gorbachev, they accounted
for 4 percent of the ruling elite; this more than tripled to 17 percent under
Yeltsin and then climbed to some 50 percent under Putin.

Civil society fared accordingly. Contrary to civil-society “promoters,” it
always exists, even in authoritarian systems, whether in the form of parties,
trade unions, other nongovernmental organizations, or simply the everyday
interactive activities of citizens. But in post-Soviet Russia, by the late
1990s, most of its political representatives had lapsed back into
pre-perestroika passivity, sporadic actions, or impotence. The turnabout was
caused by several factors, including exhaustion, disillusion, the state’s
reoccupation of political space, and the decimation of once large and
professionalized Soviet middle classes, usually said to be a prerequisite of
stable democracy, by Yeltsin’s shock-therapy measures of the early 1990s. On
the eve of the twentieth anniversary of perestroika, Gorbachev’s partner in
democratization, Aleksandr Yakovlev, spoke “a
blasphemous thought: Never in the history of Russia has there been such a
deep divide between the ruling elite and the people.” It was a considerable
exaggeration, but an expression of the fate of what Gorbachev and he had
begun.

In short, these four indicators document the downward trajectory of Russian
democratization after the end of the Soviet Union. Other political
developments were in the same direction. Constitutionalism and rule of law
were the guidelines of Gorbachev’s reforms. They did not always prevail but
stand in sharp contrast to Yeltsin’s methods, which destroyed an entire
existing constitutional order in 1993, from its parliament and fledging
Constitutional Court to reanimated councils of local government. Yeltsin then
ruled primarily by decree during the rest of the 1990s, issuing 2,300 in one
year alone. There was also the rise and fall of official respect for human
rights, always a sensitive indicator of the degree of democracy. On this
subject we have a Western study published in 2004: “Human rights violations
have increased dramatically in Russia since the collapse of the Soviet
Union.”

The conclusion seems clear: Soviet democratization, however dictatorial the
system’s preceding history, was Russia’s missed democratic opportunity, an
evolutionary road not taken. In the context of American triumphalism and its
political correctness, it is a heretical conclusion, but not in post-Soviet
Russia. Even early Yeltsin supporters and Gorbachev critics later
reconsidered the choices they had made in 1990 and 1991. Looking back, one
concluded, “Gorbachev . . . gave us political freedoms, without costs or
bloodshed—freedoms of the press, speech, assembly, and a multiparty system.”
Another pointed out, “How we used these freedoms is already our problem and
responsibility, not his.” And a third, who had lent his political support to
Yeltsin’s abolition of the Soviet Union, wondered aloud “how the country
would have developed” had it continued to exist.

Twenty years after the Soviet state ended, most Western observers agreed that
a far-reaching process of “de-democratization” was
under way in Russia. Explaining when and why it began again revealed
fundamental differences between the thinking of Western specialists,
particularly American ones, and Russians themselves.

Unlike Americans, a majority of Russians, as readers already know, regretted
the end of the Soviet Union not because they pined for “Communism” but
because they lost a familiar state and a secure way of life. Even an
imprisoned post-Soviet oligarch, like so many of his fellow citizens, saw the
event as a “tragedy,” a view that produced the adage: “Those who do not
regret the breakup of the USSR have no heart.” If only for that reason,
Russian intellectuals and political figures were less constrained by ideology
and politics than were Americans in examining the origins of
de-democratization. A growing number joined Gorbachev partisans in believing
that the end of perestroika, which had been abolished along with the Soviet
Union, had been a “lost chance” for democracy and a “tragic mistake.”

Most American commentators insisted on a different explanation and continue
to do so. Having deleted Gorbachev’s reforms from the Soviet Union’s “evil”
history and attributed democratization to Yeltsin, they blamed Putin for
having “taken Russia in the opposite direction.” Political, media, and
academic commentators who had been vocal cheerleaders for “Yeltsin-era
democracy” initiated the explanation, but it became conventional wisdom: “The
democratizing Russia that Putin inherited” fell victim to his
“anti-democratic agenda” and “blueprint for dictatorship.” Only a few
American specialists disagreed, faulting Yeltsin rather than his successor
for beginning the “rollback of democratic reforms.”

Wary perhaps of doubting “one of the great moments in history,” even fewer
have asked if the “rollback” began earlier, with the Soviet breakup itself.
The failure of journalists and policymakers to consider the possibility may
be understandable. But not even established scholars who later regretted
their “optimism” about Yeltsin’s leadership have
rethought the end of the Soviet Union. They should do so because the way its
breakup occurred—in circumstances about which standard Western accounts are
largely silent or mythical—clearly boded ill for Russia’s future. (One myth
is the “peaceful” and “bloodless” nature of the dissolution. In reality,
ethnic strife soon broke out in Central Asia and the Caucasus, killing or
brutally displacing hundreds of thousands of citizens, a
post-Soviet fallout still ongoing in the 2008 war in Georgia.)

Most generally, there were ominous parallels between the
Soviet breakup and the collapse of tsarism in 1917.
In both cases, the way the old order ended resulted in a near total
destruction of Russian statehood that plunged the country into prolonged
chaos, conflict, and misery. Russians call what ensued “Smuta,” a term full of dread derived from previous
historical experiences and not expressed in the usual transla­tion, “Time of
Troubles.” (In this respect, the end of the Soviet Union may have had less to
do with the specific nature of that system than with recurring breakdowns of
the state in Russian history.)

The consequences of 1991 and 1917, despite important differences, were
similar. Once again, hopes for evolutionary progress toward democracy,
prosperity, and social justice were crushed; a small group of radicals
imposed extreme measures on the nation; zealous struggles over property and
territory tore apart the foundations of a vast multiethnic state, this time a
nuclear one; and the victors destroyed long-standing economic and other essential
structures to build entirely anew, “as though we had no past.” Once again,
elites acted in the name of an ideology and a better future but left society
bitterly divided over yet another “accursed question”—why it had happened.
And again the people paid the price, including catastrophic declines in life
expectancy.

All of those recapitulations unfolded, amid mutual (and lasting) charges of
betrayal, during the three months from August to December 1991 when the
“dismantling of Union statehood” actually occurred. (Gorbachev felt betrayed
by the August coup plotters and by Yeltsin, Yeltsin by his Belovezh partner Kravchuk, and
millions of Russians by the Belovezh dissolution of
the Soviet Union, leading a foreign correspondent to label post-Soviet Russia
“the country of the broken word.”) The period began and ended with the coups
in Moscow and Belovezh and culminated in a
revolution from above against the reforming Soviet system led by its own
elites, analogous to, again allowing for important dissimilarities, Stalin’s
abolition of NEP Russia in 1929. Looking back, Russians of different views
would conclude it was during these months that political extremism and
unfettered greed cost them a chance for democratic and economic progress. Few
thought it happened a decade later under Putin.

Certainly, it is hard to imagine a political act more
extreme than abolishing a state of 280 million citizens, one laden with
countless nuclear and other weapons of mass destruction. And yet, Yeltsin did
it, as even his sympathizers acknowledged, precipitously and in a way that
was “neither legitimate nor democratic.” A profound departure from
Gorbachev’s commitment to gradualism, social consensus, and
constitutionalism, this was a return to the country’s “neo-Bolshevik” and earlier
traditions of imposed change, as many Russian, and even a few Western,
writers have characterized it. The ramifications were bound to endanger the
democratization achieved during the preceding six years of perestroika.

Yeltsin and his appointees promised, for example, that their extreme measures
were “extraordinary” ones, but, as had happened before in Russia, most
recently under Stalin from 1929 through 1933, they grew into a system of
rule. (The next such measure, already being planned, was “shock therapy.”)
Those initial steps had a further political logic. Having ended the Soviet
state in a way that lacked legal or popular legit­imacy, the Yeltsin ruling
group soon became fearful of real democracy. In particular, a freely elected
independent parliament and the possibility of relinquishing power in any
manner raised the specter of “going on trial and to prison.”

The economic consequences of Belovezh
were no less portentous. Liquidating the Union without any preparatory stages
shattered a highly integrated economy. In addition to abetting the
destruction of a vast state, it was a major cause of the collapse of
production across the former Soviet territories, which fell by nearly half in
the 1990s. That in turn contributed to mass poverty and its attendant social
pathologies, from declining longevity to massive corruption, which remained
the “main fact” of Russian life even in the early twenty-first century.

The economic motivation behind elite support for Yeltsin in 1991, which I
examined in chapter 5, was even more malignant. As a onetime Yeltsin
supporter wrote thirteen years later, “Almost everything that happened in
Russia after 1991 was determined to a significant extent by the divvying-up
of the property of the former USSR.” Here, too, there were foreboding
historical precedents. Twice before in twentieth-century Russia, the nation’s
fundamental property had been confiscated—the landlord’s vast estates and the
bourgeoisie’s industrial and other large assets in the revolution of 1917 and
1918, and then the land of 25 million peasant farmers in Stalin’s
collectivizationdrive in 1929 through 1933. The aftereffects of both
episodes plagued the country for many years to come.”

Soviet elites took much of the state’s enormous wealth, which for decades had
been defined in law and ideology as the “property of all the people,” with no
more regard for fair procedures or public opinion than there had been in 1917
and 1918. Indeed, an anti-Communist Russian intellectual thought that the
“Bolshevik expropriation of private property looks simply like the height of
piety against the background of the insane injustice of our absurd
privatization.” To maintain their dominant position and enrich themselves,
Soviet elites wanted the most valuable state property distributed from above,
without the participation of legislatures or any other representatives of
society. They achieved that goal first by themselves, through “spontaneous
privatization” on the eve of the Soviet dissolution, and then, after 1991,
through decrees issued by Yeltsin. As a result, privatization was haunted
from the beginning by a ‘dual illegitimacy’—in the eyes of the law . . . and
in the eyes of the population.

The political and economic consequences should have been
easy to foresee. Fearful for their dubiously acquired assets and even for
their lives and families (many were sent abroad to live), the property
holders, who formed the core of the first post-Soviet ruling elite, were as
determined as Yeltsin to limit or reverse the parliamentary electoral
democracy and media freedoms instituted by Gorbachev. In their place, they
strove to create a kind of praetorian political system devoted to and
corrupted by their wealth.

The role played in post-Soviet “de-democratization” by the “divvying up of
the property of the former USSR,” which was still under way during the
financial crisis of 2008 and 2009, is rarely noted in Western accounts. Its
full history lies outside the framework of this book, but several milestones
should be emphasized. “Privatization” of billions of dollars
worth of state assets was a central issue in the struggle between
Yeltsin and the parliament in 1993 and its destruction by tank fire in
October. It was also a motive for the super-presidential constitution imposed
on the country in December of that year, as well as the coalition between the
Kremlin and the new oligarchs to keep Yeltsin in power by rigging the 1996
presidential election.

The endangered well-being and security of that Kremlin-oligarchical “Family,”
as it became known, then inspired the “democratic
transition” of power from Yeltsin to Putin in 1999 and 2000. With demands for
social justice, criminal accountability, and impeachment growing in the
country and in the new parliament, and Yeltsin in failing political and
physical health, the oligarchs desperately needed a new protector in the
Kremlin. (In late 1999, 90 percent of Russians surveyed did not trust Yeltsin
and 53 percent wanted him put on trial.) The plan was to appoint his
successor as prime minister, who would, according to the constitution, become
acting president upon Yeltsin’s retirement until a new “election” was held.

Several candidates were rehearsed for the position before
the forty-seven-year-old Putin, a career KGB officer and head of its successor
agency, the FSB, was chosen. Though he later became a leader unlike the
oligarchs had intended, the reason behind Putin’s selection was clear: as FSB
chief, he had already demonstrated he was “willing to help” a previous patron
escape criminal indictment. And, indeed, his first act upon becoming
president was to grant Yeltsin, as agreed beforehand, lifetime immunity from
prosecution. For the first time in Russia’s centuries of police repression,
thus did a career secret policemen become its
supreme leader. (Yuri Andropov headed the KGB before becoming Soviet general
secretary in 1982, but it had not been his original or primary profession.)

The economic consequences of the “divvying-up” were no less profound.
Uncertain how long they could actually retain their immense property, the new
oligarchs were initially more interested in stripping assets than investing
in them. Capital flight soon far exceeded investment in the economy, which
fell by 80 percent in the 1990s. This was a major cause of a depression worse
than the West’s in the 1930s, with the GDP plummeting by half and real wages
(when they were paid at all) by even more, and some 75 percent of Russians
plunged into poverty. As a result, post-Soviet Russia lost many of its
hard-gained twentieth-century achievements, becoming the first nation ever to
undergo actual demodernization in peacetime.

Not surprisingly, as the new elite and its top bureaucrats were increasingly
perceived as a rapacious “off-shore aristocracy,” popular hatred of them
spread and grew more intense. In a 2005 survey, Russians rated them well
below their Soviet-era counterparts in their concern for the nation’s
welfare, their patriotism, and their morals. Having unfolded under the banner
of “democratic reform,” all of these developments further discredited
democracy, now termed “shit-ocracy,” in public
opinion. Twenty years after it began, the political and economic consequences
of the “divvying-up of the property of the former USSR”—and the conviction
that “property without power isn’t worth anything”— remain both the primary
cause of Russia’s de-democratization and the primary obstacle to reversing
it.

Considering all these ominous circumstances, why did so many Western
commentators, from politicians and journalists to scholars, hail the breakup
of the Soviet Union as a “breakthrough” to democracy and free-market
capitalism and persist in these misconceptions? Where Russia was concerned,
their reaction was again based on anti-Communist ideology, hopeful myths, and
amnesia, not historical or contemporary realities. Alluding to that myopia on
the part of people who had long sought the destruction of the Soviet state
and then “exulted” in it, a Moscow philosopher remarked bitterly, “They were
aiming at Communism but hitting Russia.”

Among the most ideological myths surrounding the end of the Soviet Union was
that it “collapsed at the hands of its own people” and brought to power in
Russia “Yeltsin and the democrats”—even “moral leaders”—who represented “the
people.” As I pointed out in the preceding chapter, no popular revolution,
national election, or referendum mandated or sanctioned the breakup, and so
there is no empirical evi­dence for this supposition. Indeed, everything
strongly suggests a different interpretation.

Even the most event-making leaders need supporters in order to carry out
historic acts. Yeltsin abolished the Soviet Union in December 1991 with the
backing of a self-interested alliance. All of its groups called themselves
“democrats” and “reformers,” but the two most important ones were unlikely
allies: the nomenklatura elites who were pursuing
the “smell of property like a beast after prey,” in the revealing metaphor of
Yeltsin’s own chief minister, and wanted property much more than any kind of
democracy or free-market competition—many had opposed Gorbachev’s reforms—and
the impatient, avowedly pro-democracy wing of the intelligentsia. Traditional
enemies in the pre-reform Soviet system, they colluded in 1991 largely
because the intelligentsia’s radical economic ideas seemed to justify nomenklatura privatization.

But the most influential pro-Yeltsin intellectuals, who
would play leading roles in his post-Soviet government, were neither
coincidental fellow travelers nor real democrats, foremost among them YegorGaidar, Anatoly Chubais, and their “team” of shock therapists. Since the
late 1980s, Chubais and others had insisted that
market economics and large private property would have to be imposed on a
recalcitrant Russian society by an “iron-hand” regime. This “great leap,” as
they extolled it, would entail “tough and unpopular” policies resulting in
“mass dissatisfaction” and thus would necessitate “anti-democratic measures.”
Like the property-seeking elites, they saw the new legislatures elected in
Russia under Gorbachev, still called soviets, as a major obstacle. “Liberal
admirers of Pinochet,” the general who had brutally imposed economic change
on Chile in the 1970s and 1980s, they said of Yeltsin, now their leader, “Let
him be a dictator!”

Little else could have been worse for Russia’s nascent democracy in 1992 than
a Kremlin belief in the need for a Pinochet-like leader to implement market
reforms, a role Gorbachev had refused to play, and a team of “reform”
intellectuals to encourage it. From there it was only a step back to Russia’s
authoritarian traditions and on to the overthrow of an elected parliament,
privatization by decree, a Kremlin-appointed financial oligarchy, and
corruption of the media and elections. A Russian law professor later
summarized what happened: “The so-called democratic movement ceased to exist
at the end of 1991. . . . Some of its members took part in the divvying up of
property and primitive ac­cumulation of capital; others hired themselves out
to the new property owners and served their interests politically.”

Certainly Chubais and his “democratic reformers”
were there at each stage, planning and justifying the undoing of
democratization, including the transition to Putin, while still yearning for
a Russian Pinochet. They became much more (or less) than intellectuals,
serving as ministers in Yeltsin’s government, notably Chubais
himself, Gaidar, Alfred Kokh,
Boris Nemtsov, and a dozen or so others. (Their
service and deeds, it should be emphasized, also had the enthusiastic support
of American policymakers, media opinion makers, and academic specialists.)

Underlying the Pinochet syndrome among Yeltsin’s intellectual supporters was
a profoundly antidemocratic contempt for the Russian people (narod). When election returns went against the
“liberals,” they questioned the “psychological health of voters”; declared,
“Russia! You’ve lost your mind!”; and concluded that
“the people are the main problem with our democracy.” And when their policies
ended in economic disaster, they pointed to the “rot in the national gene
pool” and again blamed “the people,” who “deserved their miserable fate.”
When the Soviet Union ended, however, Russia’s future was not in the hands of
the people, who had responded admirably to Gorbachev’s democratic reforms, but
in those of the elites now in power.

Political and economic alternatives still existed in Russia after 1991. Other
fateful struggles and decisions lay ahead. And none of the factors
contributing to the end of the Soviet Union were inexorable or deterministic.
But even if genuine democratic and market aspirations were among them, so
were cravings for power, political coups, elite avarice, extremist ideas,
widespread perceptions of illegitimacy, and anger over the “greatest betrayal
of the twentieth century.” All of these factors continued to play a role
after 1991, but it should already have been clear which would prevail—as
should have been the fate of the democratic alternative Gorbachev bequeathed
to Russia.

On the occasion of Gorbachev’s seventieth birthday in 2001, a Soviet-era
intellectual who had deserted him in 1990 and 1991 reevaluated his
leadership. After acknowledging that Russia’s democratization was his
achievement, she added another: “Gorbachev ended the ‘Cold War’, and that
fact in itself makes him one of the heroes of the twentieth century.” Though
Gorbachev himself always credited the “key role” played by his “partners”
Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush, few nonpartisan historians of that
process, or participants in it, deny he was the main “hero.”

Here, too, however, his legacy may have been lost. In August 2008, almost
exactly twenty years after Gorbachev delivered a historic United Nations
speech disavowing the Soviet ideological premise of the Cold War, Washington
and Moscow were fighting a proxy hot war in the former Soviet republic of
Georgia. Surrogate U.S.-Soviet military conflicts had been a regular feature
of the Cold War, in the Third World and elsewhere, but this was a more direct
confrontation by half. Washington was represented by Georgia’s military
forces, which it had amply funded for several years, but Moscow’s own troops
fought (and won) the war. Whatever the view from America, many Russians,
Georgians, and South Ossetians, on whose territory
it began, “perceived the conflict as a proxy battle between two global
powers—Russia and the United States.”

The war caught most Western governments and observers “totally by surprise”
primarily because they had failed to understand that a new (or renewed) cold
war had been developing long before the U.S.-Russian conflict in the
Caucasus. In particular, American officials and specialists, almost without
exception, had repeatedly denied that a new cold war was even possible. Some
dismissed the possibility adamantly (in reply to a small number of critics,
myself included, who warned of the mounting danger), presumably because they
had formulated, implemented, or defended policies contributing to it.
Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, for example, announced officially that
“talk about a new Cold War is hyperbolic nonsense.” And a Washington Post
columnist denounced the “notion” as “the most dangerous misjudgment of all.”

Personal motives aside, most commentators apparently misunderstood the nature
of cold war, assuming that the one following World War II was the only model.
The essential meaning of cold war is a relationship between states in which
exacerbating conflicts and confrontation are dominant in more areas than not
and usually, though not always, short of military fighting. To take two
disparate examples, the fifteen-year U.S. nonrecognition
of Soviet Russia, from 1918 to 1933, was a kind of cold war, but without an
arms race or other direct dangers to either side. The Sino-Soviet cold war,
from the 1960s to the 1980s, on the other hand, witnessed occasional military
skirmishes along a long border. Cold-war relationships vary in form, causes,
and content, the last U.S.-Soviet one being exceedingly dangerous because it
included a nuclear arms race.

Other misconceptions underlay the assumption that a U.S.-Russian cold war was
impossible after the end of the Soviet Union. Unlike before, it was widely
argued, post-1991 conflicts between Washington and Moscow were not the
product of different economic and political systems,
were not ideological or global, and, in any event, post-Soviet Rus­sia was
too weak to wage another cold war. (The “friendship” between President George
W. Bush and President Putin was often cited as further evidence, even though
Richard Nixon and Leonid Brezhnev had professed the same personal
relationship thirty years before.)

All of these assertions, which are still widespread in the United States, are
misinformed. Russia’s “capitalism” is fundamentally unlike America’s,
economically and politically. Exaggeration of ideology’s actual importance in
the previous Cold War aside, ideological conflict, or a “values gap,” between
U.S. “democracy promotion” and Russia’s “sovereign democracy”—“autocratic
nationalism,” even “fascism,” as new American cold warriors label it—has been
growing for several years, along with the number and prominence of ideologues
on both sides. And this gap, we are told, “is greater today than at any time
since Communism’s collapse.” Indeed, one of the Americans assures us,
“Ideology matters again.” Nor did the Cold War after World War II begin
globally, but in Eastern Europe, as did the new one, which is rapidly
spreading. As for Russia’s inability to fight it, that assumption was
shattered by the 2008 war in Georgia in less than a week.

The tenacious fallacy of deniers of a new cold war is illustrated by their
own accounts of the U.S.-Russian relationship, the “worst in a generation,”
as it evolved during the first decade of the twenty-first century. Though
couched in euphemisms, worsening relations could hardly be mistaken for
anything other than a new cold war. Consider the following passages from a
front-page New York Times “news analysis,” under the heading “No Cold
War, But Big Chill,” published a week after the war in Georgia broke out:

“'The cold war is over,'” President Bush declared Friday, but a new era of
enmity between the United States and Russia has emerged nevertheless. . . .
As much as Mr. Bush has argued that the old characterizations of the cold war
are no longer germane, he drew a new line . . . between countries free and
not free, and bluntly put Russia on the other side
of it. . . . Tensions are manifest already, and both sides have done their
part to inflame them. . . . The United Nations Security Council has reverted
to a cold-war­like stalemate. . . . The Russian offensive—the first outside
its territory since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991—has crystallized
a realignment already taking place in Central and Eastern Europe. . . . The
administration dropped its opposition to sending Patriot missiles, which
would defend the Polish site [for U.S. missile defense]. . . . A senior
Russian general promptly gave credence to Poland’s worst fears by saying
Friday that the country had just made itself a target of Russia’s nuclear
arsenal. . . . It may seem outdated to speak of blocs in Europe, but they are
emerging just as clearly, if less ideologically, as those that existed on
either side of the Iron Curtain. . . . In fact, the alienation between the
United States and Russia has rarely, if ever, been deeper."

If so, what happened to the “end of the Cold War?” The next chapter proposes
an answer, but this one must end where it began, by emphasizing yet another
instance of historical amnesia and revisionism. In this case, it involves the
crucial question: How and when did the Cold War end?

When Gorbachev came to power in 1985, he was already determined to pursue not
merely another relaxation of East-West tensions but an abolition of the
forty-year Cold War. He was committed to doing so for three reasons: He
believed that its most dangerous element, the U.S.-Soviet nuclear arms race,
threatened human existence. He wanted the Soviet Union to become an integral
part of the West, of a “Common European Home,” in which he included the
United States. And without substantially reducing both the international
tensions and economic costs of the Cold War, Gorbachev had little hope of
mobilizing the political support and resources at home necessary for his
perestroika reformation.

Gorbachev’s anti–Cold War mission was informed by what he and his aides
called “New Thinking.” Also decried as heresy by Communist Party
fundamentalists, it brought about a “conceptual revolution” in Soviet foreign
policy. Those ideas, together with Gorbachev’s remark­able leadership
abilities and the essential participation of a U.S. president who also feared
the potential consequences of nuclear weapons, Ronald Reagan, quickly
transformed East-West relations.

In 1986, barely a year after Gorbachev’s rise to power, the two leaders
agreed in principle that all nuclear weapons should be abolished, an
impossible goal but a vital pursuit. In 1987, they signed a treaty eliminat­ing
for the first time an entire category of those weapons, in effect putting the
long arms race in reverse gear. In 1988, while joining Gorbachev in other
important disarmament initiatives, Reagan absolved the Soviet “evil empire,”
saying of America’s new partner, “That was another time, another era.” And
when he left office in January 1989, Reagan explained why there was a new
era: “The Cold War is over."

Even if true, it had to be affirmed by Gorbachev and by Reagan’s successor,
the first President Bush. They did so emphatically in November and December
1989, first when Gorbachev refused to respond with military force, as his
predecessors had done in similar situations, to the fall of the Berlin Wall
and the disintegration of the Soviet empire in Eastern Europe; and then
together at a Malta summit meeting, which they agreed marked the onset of a
“brand new era in U.S.-Soviet relations.” Other formal ratifications soon
followed, but ultimate evidence of a post–Cold War era, however brief, was
provided in 1990 by two instances of unprecedented U.S.-Soviet cooperation:
an agreement on German reunification and Moscow’s support for the U.S.-led
war to drive Saddam Hussein’s Iraqi army, a Soviet client, out of Kuwait.

Three elements of this history were crucial. First, even allowing for the
“key” roles of Reagan and Bush, the Cold War would have continued unabated,
possibly grown worse, had it not been for Gorbachev’s initiatives. Second,
objective historians and participants disagree about exactly when the Cold
War ended, but they agree it occurred sometime between 1988 and 1990—that is,
eighteen months to three years before the end of the Soviet Union in December
1991. 75 And third, the termination of the Cold War was negotiated in a way,
as Bush initially confirmed, “so there were no losers, only winners” or, as
future Secretary of State Rice wrote, with “no winners and no losers.”

On the American side, however, those historical realities were soon
rewritten. Immediately after December 1991, the end of the Cold War was
conflated with and attributed to the end of the Soviet Union, and both were
recast for a new American triumphalist narrative. Bush himself wrote the
first draft, declaring in his January 1992 state-of-the-union address,
“America won the Cold War. . . . The Cold War didn’t end—it was won.” He
repeated the claim, which was noted and bitterly rejected by Gorbachev’s
admirers in Moscow, throughout his campaign for re­election that year.

George F. Kennan, the iconic (but usually disregarded) authority on
U.S.-Soviet relations, later dismissed the claim of a U.S. victory as
“intrinsically silly” and “simply childish,” but virtually all American
politicians and the mainstream media followed Bush’s lead, as they continue
to do today. So have leading scholars who should know better, two even
claiming that Boris Yeltsin, who became president of the Soviet Russian
Republic only in June 1991, well after the turning-point events of 1988
through 1990, had been the “catalyst for the Cold War’s end.”

The result was a “new history” written, in the words of a critic, “as seen
from America, as experienced in America, and told in a way most agreeable to
many Americans”—a “fairytale,” another wrote, “with a happy ending.” When
future historians search for the beginning of the new cold war, they may find
it at the moment when Americans rewrote the end of the preceding one by deleting
Gorbachev’s legacy.

About the Author

Stephen
F. Cohen is professor of Russian studies and history at New York University
and professor of politics emeritus at Princeton University. His books include
Bukharin and the Bolshevik Revolution: A Political Biography; Rethinking
the Soviet Experience: Politics and History Since 1917; Sovieticus: American Perceptions and Soviet
Realities; and Failed Crusade: America and the Tragedy of
Post-Communist Russia.